24 January 2010

A large part of our knowledge on the world's species is recorded in the corpus of biodiversity literature with well over hundred million pages, and is represented in natural history collections estimated at 2 – 3 billion specimens. But this body of knowledge is almost entirely in paper-print form and is not directly accessible through the Internet. For the digitization of this literature, new territories have to be chartered in the fields of technical, legal and social issues that presently impede its advance. The taxonomic literature seems especially destined for such a transformation.

This article 'BMC Research Notes' "describes the services and software of Plazi, which provide a fully functional infrastructure that allows adding new publications to be processed by running a semi-automatic mark-up process and storing the enhanced documents into a dedicated server that supports harvesting of its contents."

Note: Plazi is an association supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature.